A couple of weeks back, I subtly released Jankteki 0.6, which brought with it a refactor, lots of instability, and a feature that I’m hoping will be useful to people that aren’t me: The ability to add user notes against a user on jinteki.net.
Have you ever added a friend on Jinteki and forgot why they’re there? Me too – now I don’t need to, I can add user notes. Here’s a demo of it in action:
As I said, it has brought with it a bit of instability, and it is still in its early days in terms of quality / interaction / etc. But I need to tell people about it, in case they think the software got buggier for no reason whatsoever. I also think it’s a nice basis to build further features upon, and want to get input on it as early as possible.
One of the silver linings of the breakages is that it has led to me tightening things up in the code base.
Scarily enough, there are now just shy of 1500 users of this extension now, and when it breaks, it seems to annoy people. Going below 5 stars in the chrome extension store gave me some real impetus to try to stop that all happening again.
There are now some tests, and build scripts, and stuff that makes it look like I have any idea what I’m doing, to aid with keeping things stable in the future.
If however, something does get through these very porous nets – head on over to http://github.com/simons/jankteki to raise a bug. There’s a proper readme over there now too, so that should give you all of the information needed to get problems sorted in good time.
And if you have no idea what I am talking about, but do know what Android: Netrunner and jinteki.net are, download the Jankteki extension from the Chrome webstore. It’s pretty useful.
The more eager eyed Jankteki users may have noticed the latest release. It consists of a small in-game ‘fixes’ panel where you can manually manipulate the game state without having to look up relatively arcane chat commands.
Here’s a video of this feature in action:
It’s the first interaction I’ve done with the game directly and was made pretty simple through Clojurescript / Om’s use of websockets. It was my first experience inspecting websocket frames through the Chrome Dev tools, and it must be said – I found it to be an utter joy. Hopefully this leaves room for other enhancements down the way.
In the meantime, the next slate of work is going to be around creating a fuller user-model – adding notes, annotations, that sort of thing. Maybe even the dreaded “shitlist” feature. More information on all of this / priorities etc can be found on my Trello roadmap
In the past year or so, the collectible card game, Android: Netrunner has just about taken over my life. I won’t go on about why here, but it’s great. You should play it.
One of the more popular ways of playing it is through an online open-source implementation, jinteki.net. Legally dubious, it’s a Clojure implementation of the game – involving a huge percentage of cards, providing automations for 1000s of rules and all sorts of interactions / exceptions / custom rulings. Needless to say, it’s a fantastic amount of effort being provided by a dedicated team of developers, led by Minh Tran.
As the game and platform have become more popular, the types of players on there have varied with it. More players is good, it’s more people and decks to play against. It also comes with a trolly underbelly. Ragequits and rude users used to be unheard of there, they’re now part of the landscape.
Enter: Jankteki
Navigating all of this can be frustrating at times. Whether it’s remembering who the bad players are, or looking for people you know to play (or watch play) – these are currently hard to do. And improving the platform at the same time as keeping up to date with card implementations is a slow process. So I built myself a tool – Jankteki, a chrome extension for jinteki.net.
I intend for it to be a suite of tools to make using jinteki.net a slightly better experience day-to-day. It’s called Jankteki, because the hacky nature of building features over a ReactJS UI makes for flickers, jank, and breakages all over the place. So use it at your own risk.
The only real feature currently implemented is friends, which you can see wonderfully narrated here:
Why not raise a PR?
I know a bit of Clojure, and I enjoy writing it – but I’m nowhere near being able to contribute to a project the scale of Jinteki. There’s also the fact that my roadmap might not correlate with the Jinteki roadmap, I have features planned to scratch my itch that might be a year or two away from being even discussed in the main repo.
Some of them might not even be the job of the main webapp.
And what is this roadmap?
The full in-progress roadmap can be seen on a Trello board I am working from. But here’s a quick overview (it is completely subject to change):
I’m aiming to put in a toolbar for running console commands (deal net damage, remove counters, etc) in order that you don’t have to remember syntax or look it up every time the game state needs manually adjusting.
Notes for users. I constantly forget who people are from their usernames, a notes field could track that. It could be used to remember what type of decks they play. Or even to note who “gg”s before they leave (this is disproportionately important to me).
The killer feature I’ve talked about, but not implemented yet (I half implemented it and took it out), is some sort of bad-players list. Just a way of flagging a user visually as someone to avoid in the future. It would purely be a personal shit-list, not like a communal feature – both by design, and cos it’s outside the scope of this thing.
Game log recording / analysis. This sits in the “I’m unsure this would ever become a feature of the webapp” column. But I love the idea of logging wins and losses vs opponents, factions – methods of losing – and obviously which deck you were playing as at the time. Just as a way of tracking how you’re getting on and what works.
Problems
Building this plugin hasn’t been smooth. React’s virtual DOM makes it a nightmare to manipulate constantly changing elements – an element that indicated a friend two seconds ago may contain something else completely.
This plugin is also tightly coupled to class and element names in the jinteki.net codebase, if they change something, we’re always going to be playing catch-up. I’m ok with that. I don’t know how Minh will react to the existence of this (or if he’ll even care :D), but I hope Jankteki will benefit the Jinteki.net team in both taking the demand for certain features, and also proving and disproving features before implementing them.
And yes – it’s a bit rubbish at the mo, but it proves a concept, so please be open minded with it. There are bugs with pinned friends not showing when navigating to pages, if you have issues, try going directly to http://jinteki.net/play or just refreshing the page – I am actively working on that.
Also – things are liable to break, pre version 1 (I don’t know what that will look like), I’m pushing to the web store as often as I’m adding features / fixing bugs. So prepare to be annoyed.
I am a massive fan of jQuery. Earlier in my career, we made do with massive custom libraries full of nasty hacks to make everything work across all browsers (back to IE5.5, when I began, eurgh), and this left very little time to have fun with JavaScript. jQuery has corrected that for us – it takes care of nasty cross-browser stuff (especially ajax), makes traversing the DOM an absolute joy, and has a huge library of user-contributed code – in the form of plugins – to solve just about every common JS problem you can imagine, as well as quite a few not-so-common ones.
This post is about one of those not-so-common ones, namely the one used here on this site to print those shit-looking attempts at Piet Mondrian canvases on the background. It all came about because a) I saw a Mondrian piece and figured ‘those look kinda automatable’ and b) I’d been looking for an excuse to piss about with canvas.
You can download, fork, or just laugh at the code here on github, there’s nothing revolutionary in it – it randomly places lines and fills some of them with given colours. That’s it. Really. There are a couple of extras that I’d like to code into it further down the line, one of which is functionality similar to what can be seen on Composition With Javascript – an awesome site I discovered not long after starting to code this plugin, which executes a similar idea in a much better fashion. Another thing I’d like to possibly mess on with is the Piet programming language, how about feeding the output of such a plugin into a Piet interpreter? Or reading in piet-formatted programs? Obviously, there’s a long long way to go to get to any of that from what is essentially a toy, but they’re fun ideas – to me, at least.
But all of that really comes down to time available, there are a couple of other avenues that I’d still like to explore with regards to canvas, and they might get played with first – but the bottom line is that I’m writing in this blog more often in order to push myself to do more fun stuff to have more bollocks to write about.
